One of the biggest difference between human and other species on Earth is the evolution of human intelligence. Our ability to reason, plan, solve problem, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language and learn. Our intelligence is also something that differentiate you and me and others within the human race. 

We acquire part of our intelligence naturally when we are born however the remaining require our own effort and hard work to build it over our lifetime. All of these might sounds too grand but to put it simply - if you want to be the best in something, you have to have 100% focus and learn it. 

Take any great person in this world, be it philosopher, athletes, politician you name it. To be the best in their field, they have to constantly think, learn and practice non-stop. Michael Jordan doesn't become the best in basketball because he is born with it, he had to spend countless of hours training and shooting. Same for others like golfer or swimmer, most doesn't get to be the top 1-2% for the rest of their life. 

Malcolm Galdwell mentioned about the '10,000 hours rules' in his book, Outlier. He wrote that to be an elite performer on a specific task, example chess play, 10,000 is the amount of hours you have to put in for deliberate practice. Deliberate practice, kaizen or continuous improvement is not something you do with the keyboard, I have been typing for god knows how many years but that doesn't make me the best or the fastest typist in the world because I am not practising it deliberately. 

In investing, it holds the same theory. To get better and to be the best there is no shortcuts to it but to continue to learn and improve, that means read lots and lots of books. But learning and improving are very abstract. Looking at stock chart 24/7 until the cow comes home and go out ain't going to improve your investment performance. Yea you might improve your ability to recognize patterns faster than before and make faster decision, but that is not learning and improving.

The relentless learning I'm talking about here encompass something larger than that, you have to be constantly thinking and question your concepts, mindset, strategies etc. You have to absorb knowledge like a hungry man. It is like zooming in and out of a photo, you have to keep thinking and learning at every level of your investing. You might be zooming in on a part of your photo (strategies) and trying so hard to improve that you forgot to zoom out and look at the whole picture (system, mindset, thinking, concepts) until you'd waste so much time on something that probably doesn't matter.

Warren Buffett can be considered the most reknown and successfull investor in the world, althought there will be many that disagree. And there are plenty of people out there claiming they outperformed Buffett's. You might be one of them, if you are making 100% return annually or more in the past few years and done that without trying too hard. Let's think about this for a sec. Warren Buffett has been investing since 1959 so that is 54 years of investing experience, and he reads on average 400-500 pages everyday, hmm that's about 9 million pages. And he ONLY managed to compound on average 30% per year. With his massive amount of experience and compounded knowledge, rolling like a snowball for 54 years, what makes you think you have beaten him? And you want to beat him by looking at charts 24/7 with your self-invented strategies? Think about it.